The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks and Sara Pekkanen

OK - I will be honest, I liked this book a lot more than I expected to.  I found the title on NetGalley and requested it because a friend of mine had received an ARC of this as well and I thought that it would be fun for the both of us to read it together.  I love psychological novels but have been burned by the promises of dark and twisty books in the past, (I'm thinking about you Girl on the Train) so I approached this book with a light-hearted open mind.

The Good: They caught me off guard with the switchbacks in the plot.  This jaded reader is not easy to fool but I found myself flipping back a few pages at the end of the first section saying "Wait...What?" and re-reading to make sure that what I thought I read was really how things went down.  So bravo on that front!

I wanted to hate the characters and write them off as your typical, spoiled, rich, New York Housewives that I normally loathe in books - but I ended up really enjoying the development that happened as the novel progressed and you found out more and more layers of each player.

The Notes: Near the end, the actions of the main character stretched where I was willing to go with them.  It's so hard to write this without spoilers but - as calculating as she was throughout the entire novel - I found it hard to believe that the big denouement was as haphazard and left to chance as it ended up being.

The book is credited to two authors and, looking back on the reading experience, I could see those separate voices poking through even where they weren't supposed to.  I'll be interested to see if the writing duo persists and how they continue to smooth out their process over time.

Overall, I am very glad that I was granted a copy of this book by St Martin's Press and Netgalley.  It will make a great summer read and one to reach for if you need a fun and light read that gives you a nice surprise in the middle.  Overall Rating: 3.5 stars.